Nick Lane is a biochemist at UCL and author of Transformer, The Vital Question, and many other amazing books on biology, chemistry, and life. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:09 - Origin of life
14:56 - Panspermia
20:30 - What is life?
33:44 - Photosynthesis
37:19 - Prokaryotic vs eukaryotic cells
47:20 - Sex
55:03 - DNA
1:02:15 - Violence
1:12:50 - Human evolution
1:18:45 - Neanderthals
1:22:18 - Sensory inputs
1:33:08 - Consciousness
2:04:41 - AI and biology
2:34:00 - Evolution
2:54:32 - Fermi paradox
3:07:52 - Cities
3:15:39 - Depression
3:18:14 - Writing
3:26:13 - Advice for young people
3:33:22 - Earth

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Well, the source of energy at the origin of life is the reaction between carbon dioxide and hydrogen.

And amazingly, most of these reactions are hexagonic, which is to say they release energy.

If you have hydrogen and CO2 and you put them together in a Falcon tube and you warm it up to say 50 degrees centigrade and you put in a couple of catalysts and you shake it, nothing's gonna happen.

But thermodynamically, that is less stable.

2 gases, hydrogen and CO2 is less stable than cells.

What should happen is you get cells coming out.

Why doesn't that happen is because of the kinetic barriers.

The following is a conversation with Nick Lane, a biochemist at University College London and author of some of my favorite books on biology, science and life ever written, including his 2 most recent titled, "'Transformer, The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death," and, "'The Vital Question, Why Is Life the Way It Is?' This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

Let's start with perhaps the most mysterious, the most interesting question that we little humans can ask of ourselves.

You could ask anybody working on the subject and you'll get a different answer from all of them.

They will be pretty passionately held opinions and their opinions grounded in science, but they're still really at this point, their opinions, because there's so much stuff to know that all we can ever do is get a small slice of it, and it's the context which matters.

My answer is from a biologist's point of view, that has been missing from the equation over decades, which is, well, what does life do on Earth?

Why is it powered by electrical charges on membranes?

There's all these interesting questions about cells that if you then look to see, well, is there an environment on the early Earth 4000000000 years ago that kind of matches the requirements of cells?

It's basically created by whenever you have a wet rocky planet, you get these hydrothermal vents which generate hydrogen gas in bucket loads and electrical charges on kind of cell-like pores that can drive the kind of chemistry that life does.

So it seems so beautiful and so obvious that I've spent the last 10 years or more trying to do experiments.

Everything's more difficult than you ever thought it was going to be.

But it looks, I would say, more true rather than less true over that 10-year period.

I think I have to take a step back every now and then and think, hang on a minute, where's this going?

I'm happy it's going in a sensible direction.

I think then you have these other interesting dilemmas.

I'm often accused of being too focused on life on earth, too kind of narrow-minded and inward-looking, you might say.

I'm talking about carbon, I'm talking about cells, and maybe you or plenty of people can say to me, ah yeah, but life can be anything, I have no imagination.

And maybe they're right, but unless we can say why life here is this way, and if those reasons are fundamental reasons or if they're just trivial reasons, then we can't answer that question.

So I think they're fundamental reasons, and I think we need to worry about them.

Yeah, there might be some deep truth to the puzzle here on Earth that will resonate with other puzzles elsewhere that will, solving this particular puzzle will give us that deeper truth.

So what, to this puzzle, you said vents, hydrogen, wet, so chemically, what is the potion here?

Yeah, and I actually just came straight here from a conference where I was chairing a session on whether oxygen matters or not in the history of life.

Of course it matters, But it matters most to the origin of life to be not there.

As I see it, we have this I mean, life is made of carbon, basically, primarily, organic molecules with carbon-carbon bonds.

And the building block, the Lego brick that we take out of the air or take out of the oceans is carbon dioxide.

And to turn carbon dioxide into organic molecules, we need to strap on hydrogen.

And this is basically what life is doing.

It's taking the hydrogen that bubbles out of the earth in these hydrothermal vents and it sticks it on CO2.

And it's kind of really as simple as that.

And actually thermodynamically, the thing that I find most troubling is that if you do these experiments in the lab, the molecules you get are exactly the molecules that we see at the heart of biochemistry and the heart of life.

Is there something to be said about the earliest origins of that little potion, that chemical process?

And there is kind of a spark, but it's a continuous electrical charge which helps drive that reaction.

But yes, I mean a spark in that sense is, we tend to think of in terms of Frankenstein, we tend to think in terms of electricity and 1 moment you zap something and it comes alive.

It's come alive and now what's sustaining it?

Well, we are sustained by oxygen, by this continuous chemical reaction.

And if you put a plastic bag on your head, then you've got a minute or something before it's all over.

So some way of being able to leverage a source of energy.

If you have hydrogen and CO2 and you put them together in a Falcon tube and you warm it up to say 50 degrees centigrade and you put in a couple of catalysts and you shake it, nothing's going to happen.

But thermodynamically, that is less stable, 2 gases, hydrogen and CO2, is less stable than cells.

So why doesn't that happen is because of the kinetic barriers, That's where you need the spark.

Is it possible that life originated multiple times on Earth?

The way you describe it, you make it sound so easy.

There's a long distance to go from the first bits of prebiotic chemistry to say molecular machines like ribosomes.

Is that the first thing that you would say is life?

Like if I introduced you, the 2 of you at a party, you would say that's a living thing?

I would say as soon as we introduce genes, information, into systems that are growing anyway, so I would talk about growing protocells, as soon as we introduce even random bits of information into there, I'm thinking about RNA molecules, for example.

Doesn't have to have any information in it.

But if it's introduced into a system, which is in any case growing and doubling itself and reproducing itself, then any changes in that sequence that allow it to do so better or worse are now selected by perfectly normal natural selection.

So that's when it becomes alive to my mind.

That's encompassed into like an object that keeps information and evolves that information over time, changes that information over time.

So it's always part of a cell system from the very beginning.

So is your sense that it started only once because it's difficult, or is it possibly started in multiple locations on earth?

It's possibly started multiple occasions.

1 of them is oxygen makes it impossible, really, for life to start.

So as soon as we've got oxygen in the atmosphere, then life isn't going to keep starting over.

So I often get asked by people, why can't we have life starting?

If it's so easy, why can't life start in these vents now?

And the answer is, if you want hydrogen to react with CO2 and there's oxygen there, hydrogen reacts with oxygen instead.

It's just you're getting explosive reaction that way, it's rocket fuel.

But for the origin of life earlier than that, all we know is that there's a single common ancestor for all of life.

There could have been multiple origins and they all just disappeared.

But there's a very interesting deep split in life between bacteria and what are called archaea, which look just the same as bacteria.

And they're not quite as diverse, but nearly.

And they are very different in their biochemistry.

And so any explanation for the origin of life has to account as well for why they're so different and yet so similar.

And that makes me think that life probably did arise only once.

Can you describe the difference that's interesting there?

How they're similar, how they're different?

Well, they're different in their membranes primarily.

They're different in things like DNA replication.

They use completely different enzymes and the genes behind it for replicating DNA.

So they both have membranes, both have DNA replication, the process of that is different.

They both have DNA, the genetic code is identical in them both, the way in which it's transcribed into RNA, into the copy of a gene, and the way that that's then translated into a protein, that's all basically the same in both these groups.

It's just that they're different in fundamental ways as well.

And if you think about, well, what kind of processes could drive that divergence very early on?

I can think about it in terms of membranes, in terms of the electrical charges on membranes.

And it's that that makes me think that there were probably many unsuccessful attempts and only 1 really successful attempt.

Can you explain why that divergence makes you think there's 1 common ancestor?

I'm a little bit unclear about why the diver, like the leap from the divergence means there's 1.

Do you mean like the divergence indicates that there was a big invention at that time from

If you'd got, as I imagine it, you have a common ancestor living in a hydrothermal vent.

Let's say there are millions of vents and millions of potential common ancestors living in all of those vents, but only 1 of them makes it out first, then you could imagine that that cell is then going to kind of take over the world and wipe out everything else.

And so what you would see would be a single common ancestor for all of life.

But with lots of different vent systems, all kind of vying to create the first life forms, you might say.

We're always talking about populations of cells, but yes.

But the fundamental life form is a single cell, right?

So like, or, so they're always together, but they're alone together.

There's a machinery in each 1 individual component that if left by itself would still work, right?

It's the unit of selection is a single cell.

But selection operates over generations and changes over generations in populations of cells.

So it would be impossible to say that a cell is the unit of selection in the sense that unless you have a population, you can't evolve, you can't change.

Right, but there was 1 Chuck Norris, it's an American reference, cell that made it out of the vents, right?

So imagine then that there's 1 cell gets out and it takes over the world.

It gets out in the water, it's like floating around.

But actually 2 cells got out And they appear to have got out from the same vent because they both share the same code and everything else.

So unless all the, you know, we've got a million different common ancestors in all these different vents.

So either they all have the same code and 2 cells spontaneously merged from different places or 2 different cells, fundamentally different cells, came from the same place.

So either way, what are the constraints that say not just 1 came out or not half a million came out, but 2 came out.

Well, they come out because what you're doing inside a vent is you're relying on the electrical charges down there to power this reaction between hydrogen and CO2 to make yourself grow.

And when you leave the vent, you've got to do that yourself.

You've got to power up your own membrane.

And so the question is, well, how do you power up your own membrane?

And the answer is, well, you need to pump.

You need to pump ions to give an electrical charge on the membrane.

Well, the pumps look different in these 2 groups.

It's as if they both emerge from a common ancestor.

As soon as you've got that ancestor, things move very quickly and divergently.

Why does the DNA replication look different?

The membranes are different, the DNA replication is different because it's joined to a different kind of membrane.

So there's interesting, you know, this is detail you may say, but it's also fundamental because it's about the 2 big divergent groups of life on Earth that seem to have diverged really early on.

It all started from 1 organism, and then that organism just start replicating the heck out of itself with some mutation of the DNA.

So like there's some, there's a competition through the process of evolution.

They're not like trying to beat each other up.

Yeah, well, you know, let's not minimize their.

They're trying to relax up in the, but there's no sense of trying to survive.

I mean, there's no sense in which they're trying to do anything.

They're just kind of an outgrowth of the earth, you might say.

Of course, the aliens would describe us humans in that same way.

Okay, what do you think about the idea of panspermia, that the theory that life did not originate on Earth and was planted here from outer space.

Or pseudopanspermia, which is like the basic ingredients, the magic that you mentioned was planted here from elsewhere in space.

So pseudo-transpermia, the idea that the chemicals, the amino acids, the nucleotides are being delivered from space.

They're delivered on meteorites, comets, and so on.

Well, what do they do is they stock a soup.

Presumably they land in a pond or in an ocean or wherever they land.

And then you end up with a best possible case scenario is you end up with a soup of nucleotides and amino acids.

And then you have to say, so now what happens?

And the answer is, oh, well, they have to go, become alive.

You may as well say, then a miracle happened.

I think what we have in a vent is a continuous conversion, a continuous growth, a continuous reaction, a continuous converting a flow of molecules into more of yourself, you might say, even if it's a small bit.

So you've got a kind of continuous self-organization and growth from the very beginning.

Isn't the entire universe and living organisms in the universe, isn't it just soup all the way down?

No, no, I mean soup almost by definition doesn't have a structure.

But Soup is a collection of ingredients that are like randomly

They're not, I mean, we have chemistry going on here.

We have membranes forming, which are effective oil-water interactions.

Okay, so it feels like there's a direction to a process, like a direct process?

And if you're starting with CO2 and you've got 2 reactive fluids being brought together and they react, what are they gonna make?

Well, they make carboxylic acids, which include the fatty acids that make up the cell membranes and they form directly into bilayer membranes.

It's spontaneous organization caused by the nature of the molecules.

And those things are capable of growing and are capable in effect of being selected even before there are genes.

So we have a lot of order and that order is coming from thermodynamics.

And the thermodynamics is always about increasing the entropy of the universe.

But if you have oil and water and they're separating, You're increasing the entropy of the universe even though you've got some order which is the soap and the water are not miscible.

Now, to come back to your first question about panspermia properly, that just pushes the question somewhere else.

That just, even if it's true, Maybe life did start on Earth by panspermia.

So what are the principles that govern the emergence of life on any planet?

It's an assumption that life started here.

And it's an assumption that it started in a hydrothermal vent or it started in a terrestrial geothermal system.

The question is, can we work out a testable sequence of events that would lead from 1 to the other 1 and then test it and see if there's any truth in it or not?

With panspermia, you can't do any of that.

But the fundamental question of panspermia is, do we have the machine here on Earth to build life?

Is oxygen and hydrogen and whatever the heck else we want and some source of energy and heat, is that enough to build life?

But there could be aliens right now chuckling at that idea.

Maybe you need some special sauce, special elsewhere sauce.

So your sense is we have everything here.

So I like to, when I'm talking in schools, I like to start out with the idea of, we can make a time machine.

We go back 4000000000 years and we go to these environments that people talk about.

We go to a deep sea hydrothermal vent, we go to a Yellowstone Park type place environment, and we find some slime that looks like we can test it.

It's got a structure which is not obviously cells, but is this a stepping stone on the way to life or not?

Unless we've got an intellectual framework that says this is a stepping stone and that's not a step.

We wouldn't know which environment to go to, what to look for, how to say this.

So all we can ever hope for, because we're never going to build that time machine, is to have an intellectual framework that can explain step by step, experiment by experiment, how we go from a sterile inorganic planet to living cells as we know them.

And in that framework, every time you have a choice, it could be this way or it could be that way, or there's lots of possible forks down that road.

Could it have been the other way and would that have given you life with very different properties?

And so if you come up with a, you know, it's a long hypothesis because as I say, we're going from really simple prebiotic chemistry all the way through to genes and molecular machines.

And nobody in the field would agree on the order in which these things happened, which is not a bad thing because it means that you have to go out and do some experiments and try and demonstrate that it's possible or not possible.

It's so freaking amazing that it happened though.

It feels like there's a direction to the thing.

Can you try to answer from a framework perspective of what is life?

So you said there's some order, and yet there's complexity.

So it's not perfectly ordered, it's not boring.

There's still some fun in it, And it also feels like the processes have a direction through the selection mechanism.

They seem to be building something, always better, always improving.

That's our romanticization of things are always better.

Things are getting better, we'd like to believe that.

I mean, you think about the world from the point of view of bacteria, and bacteria are the first things to emerge from whatever environment they came from, And they dominated the planet very, very quickly.

4000000000 years later, they look exactly the same.

So about 4000000000 years ago, bacteria started to really run the show.

Then after 2000000000 years, we see another single event origin if you like of our own type of cell, the eukaryotic cells, the cells with a nucleus and lots of stuff going on inside.

Another singular origin, it only happened once in the history of life on Earth.

Maybe it happened multiple times and there's no evidence, everything just disappeared, but we have to at least take it seriously that there's something that stops bacteria from becoming more complex because they didn't.

You know, that's a fact that they emerged 4000000000 years ago and something happened 2000000000 years ago, but the bacteria themselves didn't change.

So there is no trajectory, necessary trajectory, towards great complexity in human beings at the end of it.

It's very easy to imagine that without photosynthesis arising or without eukaryotes arising, that a planet could be full of bacteria and nothing else.

We'll get to that, because that's a brilliant invention.

And there's a few brilliant invention along the way.

If you were to show up on Earth, but to take that time machine, and you said, asking yourself the question, is this a stepping stone towards life?

As you step along, when you see the early bacteria, how would you know it's life?

And then this is really important question when you go to other planets and look for life.

Like what is the framework of telling a difference between a rock and a bacteria?

I mean, the question's kind of both impossible to answer and trivial at the same time.

And I don't like to answer it because I don't think there is an answer.

I mean, there's lots of, at least 40 or 50 different definitions of life out there.

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Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318